Apollo 13

My favourite of all the Apollo movies, and the butt of the many of my jokes. The first time I saw "Apollo 11" in HMV, I said to my friend at the time "Oh god! He's done a Lucas and made a prequel!"

It's a Tom Hanks movie, and as we all know, Hank does not make bad films. It's like an un-written rule in Hollywood.

The problem is: How the hell do you create suspense, drama and make the audience believe and feel the angst of the families when we all know it turned out all right in the end. Woops! Is that a spoiler?

If you have a problem, if no other director can help, and if you can find him, maybe you can hire....Ron Howard.

With his attention to detail, high technical standards and love of the boom-cam, Howard has managed to turn an extraordinary story with a known outcome, into a masterpiece of suspense and tension.

First was his intimate attention to detail. With only about 50 men on the planet who can fly the Apollo spacecraft, the ones who watched the film were amazed that Hanks, Pullman and Bacon were actually hitting the right buttons. Who else would give you that much detail? Who else would care that much about the finished product?

Then came the technical excellence. Building a set in the "vomit comet" and flying his actors in zero-gravity. No "pen on a fishing line" for Howard. Oh no. In fact, there's only one other movie that's been filmed in zero-gravity that springs to mind. But it's, erm...not the sort of movie that Jackie would want me talking about here...

And finally, the boom-cam. Ron Howard's favourite toy. He's said on several occasions that he would have filmed the whole movie on it, if he could. His preferred method was to swing it into a crowd. Look closely in super slo-mo on the DVD and you can see people diving for cover as it whizzes over their head.

We all know the story, Lovell, Haise and Swaggert all swear they never had a bust up in the lunar module, and the schmaltzy loss of Marilyn's ring in the shower actually happened.

I first owned this on VHS, and some of the DVD features were added at the end of the tape, which was the first time I'd seen anything like that.

This film also spawned the excellent "From the Earth to the Moon" series. Each episode was introduced by Tom Hanks and it told the entire Apollo story, including how Neil Armstrong nearly died two weeks before launch when the lunar lander simulator fell apart in mid air, how he let Buzz fly the lander on the far side of the moon with the immortal phrase

"Were on the dark side of the moon Buzz. Who's gonna know?"

and how Pete Conrad (Apollo 12 commander) and his lunar pilot were forced to strip off and enter the command module naked after his moon walk, because the command pilot saw the state their moon dust covered clothes were in and didn't want them messing up his ship. His phrase still makes me chuckle:

"So I was thinking. If something goes wrong when we jettison the lunar module, and this hatch blows, and thousands of years from now some aliens find this capsule drifting in space with two naked astronauts strapped into it; they're going to wonder just what we were doing up here...."

Score: 8/10

OQ: "Looks like we just had our glitch for this mission."